‘Health is Wealth’ so goes an old saying and holds true in its every logical explanation. The healthcare industry, being one of the largest, is also the fastest growing industry in the world. IBM’s significant contribution to healthcare with its wide spectrum of solution offerings through a gamut of capabilities has made IBM earn many valuable clients from the industry. For example: IBM is collaborating with Nuance to Apply IBM’s "Watson" Analytics Technology to Healthcare (press release)

Integrated Service Management for healthcare helps our clients meet their business challenges and achieve smarter healthcare system. Tivoli Case Study: Healthcare is a repository of our clients’ success stories which brings an interesting insight on various kinds of challenges that may arise in a business scenario, the solutions offered and its benefits.

Increasingly, physical assets are being transformed into digitally aware, smart assets that can receive and emit data and connect with one another, allowing people, systems and objects to communicate and interact with each other in entirely new ways creating opportunities for smarter, differentiated services and products.

As the world becomes more intelligent, instrumented and interconnected, designing and delivering the systems and application software for innovative new products and services becomes more and more complex.

For example, today’s cars contain a 100 million lines of code that are connected to the dealer, to a smart traffic system, to an insurance provider, and to a smartphone, which alone could run 100,000s of new applications.

The complexity of these systems of systems has exploded overnight as every single service and interaction between the multiple systems needs to be managed, monitored, and maintained across the entire service lifecycle.

Current models of design, development, operations, and deployment do not scale and are not cost effective. In addition, there is a huge gap between design, delivery, and operations, inhibiting the efficient delivery of services.

Both development and operations see a number of challenges in their IT and product delivery organizations:

70% of budget locked in maintenance

50% of applications rolled back

30% of project costs due to rework

85% of computing capacity idling

Integrated Service Management—which includes Rational and Tivoli software--helps bridge the gap between software development and operations teams. It provides integration of data and workflows across architecture, development, testing and operations software. It integrates best practices including ITIL and IBM assets for SOA, Development and IT Operations to accelerate time to value. Integrated Service Management helps organizations:

Identify required changes and resolve customer issues in less time

Reduce system downtime and repair costs

Limit risk exposure by providing better visibility to change impact

Featured products include: Federated asset management.IBM Rational Asset Manager helps architects and operations with fast problem resolution as the single catalog of known software assets, such as patterns, past change requests, and in-production services and products. Federation with IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database simplifies deployment with automated synchronization and reduces data duplication, allowing only secure proven assets and services into production environments.

We love our planet, Mother
Earth. Don’t we? As for me, having been born and brought up in a place so close
to nature, away from bustle of city, and having studied ‘Environment and
Resource Economics’ as one of the subjects in my Post Grad, these things have
always been the driving forces behind my love and fascination towards Mother
Earth. And, since Mother Earth is inseparable from the technological revolution
and innovations happening around us, it gives me a proud feeling to be an IBMer
who works towards Big Blue’s mission of a Smarter Planet.

Visibility, Control and Automation™ is how
IBM defines service management which, when obtained for the smarter business infrastructures and end-to-end service
chain, can take any business to its zenith and contribute in making our
Mother Earth a Smarter Planet.

IBM’s Tivoli® Software places
IBM in a unique position to help the clients provide smarter solutions and the
expertise needed to design, build and manage a infrastructure that enables them
to improve service, reduce cost and manage risk.

Not long ago, while surfing
through our case study database, I stumbled upon a Tivoli success story that
caught my attention and I’m happy to share the same with our readers here.“Schweizerische
Bundesbahnen (SBB) Leverages rail system and network transparency to keep
trains on schedule”. Wow, the title looked so fascinating to me and that might
be because I’ve had many not-so-good-train-experiences, delay in arrival or
departure and the likes (which I always dislike).

Schweizerische Bundesbahnen
(SBB), or Swiss Federal Railways, is Switzerland’s leading transportation
company.SBB transports over 800,000
passengers and more than 220,000 tons of cargo each day, maintains 3,011
kilometers of track that connects more than 800 rail stations and also a large
construction organization that engages in roughly 5,000 construction programs
each year. However, due to inefficient monitoring systems, a one day system
problem in 2005 had stranded nearly 200,000 passengers, costing almost US$5
million. Hence, SBB was looking for a more aggressive service management
strategy to prevent future events of this type and operate 9000 trains a day
without any hassles.

1.Delivers
customizable user interfaces that increase network transparency, and helps
support staff to be better informed about infrastructure health.2.Leverages proactive management and automated
alert systems to recognize and repair more than 50 percent of issues before
they can impact operations.3.Increases the availability of SBB’s train
network by approximately 2,000 minutes per month - therefore saving
approximately US$2.3 million each year.

Martin Schaeren, Head of BU
Service Management, Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), is all praise for IBM, “Trying to manage 3,000 kilometers of track
is a particularly daunting task. But, by leveraging our new IBM solution, we’re
able to see our entire infrastructure clearly and respond to problems before
they can affect our operations.”

Well, a commendable success
story indeed. We, the IBMers, sincerely, wish that all the railway systems of
our world become ‘smarter’, sooner than later. What say?

That was a cheap ploy for me to work in a comment about how excited I am that Austin is well on it's way to getting a Formula 1 track (Statesman).

Shameless? Or brilliant? You make the call

Anyhow, the title is a pun on the Random Access Compression Engine™ (RACE) architecture that is a part of the Storwize offering that IBM recently acquired.

I want to welcome all the Storwize employees to IBM (hello!) and let our customers know that this is some pretty tight technology and it's worth reaching out to your IBM sales rep or business partner to learn more about it.

In short:

Storwize provides real-time data compression technology to help clients reduce physical storage requirements by up to 80%*, which improves efficiency and lowers the cost of making data available for analytics and other applications.

Here are three good links for more details on the aquisition as well as a quick video featuring Doug Balog, Vice President of IBM Storage.

If you are friends of Tivoli experts on Twitter, you may see #tivtour tweets quite a bit this week. See my recent write up on this topic to learn more about the mystery event. Also, see Twitter Search for #tivtour on Twazzup
for a running stream of related tweets and photos. The Tivoli Tour runs
at many IBM locations this week and in Brazil on May 29. So you can
expect to see more Twitter conversations in the near future.

Are you interested in learning more about Cloud Computing and Virtualization? Be sure to register and attend these two community webcasts happening this week on June 8th and 9th. These promise to be very informative events you don’t want to miss!

WEBCAST on Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 11:00AM Eastern USAWebcast title: Get your image sprawl monster under control – secrets to image management from an expertSign up for this webcast here

Description: Companies have embraced virtualization primarily to impro! ve utilization of hardware and save costs. However, virtualization especially on x86, has led to significant growth in management costs. Much of this increased cost stems from growth in images. We will discuss some of the key challenges around managing images and how IBM is taking a holistic approach to solving these pain points and restoring control.

WEBCAST on Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 11:00AM Eastern USACloud - Extending your virtualization into the cloudSign up for this webcast here

Description: The benefits from cloud computing seem clear: cost reduction, better flexibility, scale to meet business demands, etc. However, getting to cloud involves a lot of decisions Learn how some of your colleagues are leveraging Tivoli solutions to automate virtualized environments and move to private clouds.

All you have to do is create an original video that describes how your Tivoli software products have helped your company solve a problem, improve performance or deliver business value.

No, you won't be eligible for the 2011 Academy Award nominations (not even for documentaries), but you will be eligible to win an Apple iPad, iTouch, iPod Nano, $100 gift check, or $50 gift check.

Get started today - the deadline for contest submissions is August 16th. Winners will be announced on September 21st. (You may want to start thinking about what you're gonna wear). In the meantime, you'll want to read this article with the contest details.

But be forewarned - Hollywood may come a-callin'...you may need to get yourself an agent.

Signing off for now,Your friendly roving Integrated Service Management Reporter

I delivered an
SM simulation for a client in the middle of a tropical paradise in Brazil
last week. It is a hard life but I guess someone has to do it. The countryside
around was stunningly beautiful, and the views driving there even more so. I
was reminded of the great Frank Keating’s reporting from an English cricket
tour of the West Indies for readers in a cold
and wet British winter; his opening line to his readers: “Another day
in paradise”.

Well, like
Frank, I was there to work, and work I did –another successful and fun game – I
always enjoy how much the delegates enjoy the experience; we should all have more
work that actually makes people happy.

We had a mix of
nationalities and cultures on the game – a real challenge but one that brings
its own extra flavours. I was thinking about those cultural variations on the drive
back to São Paulo
airport – and I realised there is much more to culture than the obvious things
like language.

My driver was a
very nice man – a pleasure to share a space with, just enough English to
converse, comfortable with silence and caring enough to return from a rest stop
with an unsolicited bottle of water for me; plus a cheerful insistence that I
try local specialties that I might not have seen before So, all-in-all, clearly
he is a man who wants me to be comfortable and survive the journey.

So, why did he
frighten the living daylights out of me at irregular intervals on the way?
Simply by behaving normally for his culture: using road verges to pass trucks
at high speed on the wrong side, overtaking in the middle of road works, driving
at high speed within inches of other vehicles. While this seemed reckless to my
culture, it is everyday for Brasil. It made me realise that as well as the
social variations, culture extends to acceptable risk – what would just result
in a late arrival in western Europe is met with acalculated risk to get past the slow moving
obstacles, a culture that values speed over safety perhaps? Or more likely just
the inevitable reaction to the extreme traffic volumes and conditions there. I
didn’t see it as a better nor a worse attitude, just a different one – and
there being differences left in the world is something I, for one, feel is an
unmitigatedly good thing.

I’ve experienced
many Brasilian taxi drivers before, so I was not surprised, but what did amaze
me was how quickly and unnoticed that culture got into my thinking and
unconscious actions. Back in the UK, driving home from the airport I
found myself changing lanes MUCH more than I usually would. Not too recklessly
I hope, but it took a while before I was back to my normal UK driving
mode.

So if we copy
cultural elements so quickly after so short a visit – and that copying spills
over into our next situation, do we do that with our customers too? Do we bring
the needs of the previous customer we worked with to our next, even if it isn’t
the right culture for them? Maybe this is just one more thing for us to watch
out for in our business relationships?

This weekend partners, developers, and IBMers will be descending upon Orlando, Florida for Innovate 2011, the Rational Software conference.

Not surprisingly, Rational's "first cousin" Tivoli will have a prominent presence at the conference, including 30 sessions that highlight the Tivoli/Rational integration, six booths in the Solutions Expo, and several executive speaker slots.

Tivoli delivers innovative solutions to address business priorities, with Integrated Service Management providing the Visibility, Control and Automation™ to overcome growing complexities and keep up with global competition. But more specifically, Integrated Service Management is the catalyst that can smooth out the interactions between development and operations for IT and business professionals across all industries.

As I wrote last week, I am looking forward to delivering more simulations over the next weeks and months, I always enjoy the buzz of working with people rather than sitting in a lonely room hitting keys and listening to the dog snore.

I went through my technologically savvy period some years ago (back in the horse-drawn computer age). For years now I’ve felt that the biggest scope for improvement in service management is through the people part of the famous trilogy of people, process and technology.

It’s important though to be sure that we don't forget it is a trilogy – in a recent presentation I used a picture of a milking stool to make the point: three legs, if you have problems in any one of them you will fall on the floor, spill the milk and fail to do your job.

So the emphasis on people is not because we don't need the technology – it’s because there have always been plenty of people selling the technology hard in our business. And it sometimes seems to me that there are people even keener and more excited to buy it – each one as much a fashion victim as the lady horrified she’ll be spotted in last year’s shoes. But – for sure – we do need good technology. Of course, I work for a software and technology company so I would say that, but that doesn’t make it wrong.

And process is still vital – that is the first level of learning that comes from our simulation games – not knowing what needs to be done usually means you don’t do what needs doing. I remember getting excited by process when I first understood how to see and then improve them. I remember also how much better ITIL V2 was than V1 when we went ‘process focused’ – and how modern and nifty we thought we were.

But again – there is no shortage of process champions, so forgive me if I keep harping on about the people. There are more of us than there used to be pushing the importance of people. Paul Wilksinson, of course, has been – and still is – a trailblazer, although he is still obliged to play the prophet because the vast majority of our industry still needs to be converted to the simple reality; that no matter how cool your IT gadgets and software and no matter how carefully researched your process, if you don't keep the third leg – people – strong and secure then things simply won’t work.

Successful politics is called ‘The art of the possible[1]” and I am aware we – those who believe that people factors are the biggest stumbling block to successful service management – need to play that game too. No point (yet) trying to make everyone totally people focused – our efforts through the simulators and suchlike are to at least get IT managers to realise that the quality of the services they deliver does depend on people aspects. It’s simple stuff really, like people talking to each other, finding out what things matter to them.

Strangely enough, this is the kind of thing we do well and automatically outside work, but somehow it becomes so much harder when it gets all business related – maybe we like to take sides at work, or think the office is too important a place to act human in. What is about being in the office (or Datacentre or shop floor or whatever your work looks like) that strips us of some basic level of humanity? We seem able to talk to our colleagues at work about non-work things – last nights TV or football, fashions, music etc – but not about their work wants and needs.

Of course there are exceptions – we need to capture and promote these to help us get the message across. My favourite is a reversal of the norm I just described. It is from a UKgovernment department where a cricket match between IT and Finance was being played out one evening. Due to Finance’s excellent bowling there was a hiatus since the batsmen were being dismissed faster than the next one could get the equipment on. During this pause the non-striking batsmen (from IT) was chatting about work and they solved a issue that had turned into a long running fight between managers. The managers had stood on principles and formality instead of talking about what was actually wanted. The issue was solved by these real workers getting a mutual understanding through the revolutionary approach of talking and listening to each other.

That’s what we shall be trying to do with the delegates to our simulation sessions – and in other ‘take the people seriously’ initiatives. Do you have some good stories about how much difference it makes when your people are able to understand each other’s perspectives? Be great to hear them. Be even better to catch up at one of the forthcoming simulations, or to see you at Pulse in March and we can talk – and listen - over a beer. J

[1] Apparently coined by Bismark, but I first heard it used by Harold Wilson in the 1960s

FYI, the recent IBM Service Management Jam on Cloud Computing, "Cloud Computing: Innovation that drives IT and operations efficiencies" is the #1 most popular of the 41 Jams aired to date.
Cloud Computing Jam link: http://bit.ly/9mt8N
Jams page link: http://bit.ly/ultmC

The IBM Impact 2009 conference wrapped up last week and was a huge success. It has set the bar for all future IBM and IT events yet to come! While lots of great events and activities took place at the conference, of notable attention was the use of social media around the conference. See the Impact communities page for a list of social media tools such as blogs, Twitter, Flickr, widgets used.

James Taylor and Andy Piper won the Impact social media game for being the most active in the social media environments.

The Impact team displayed Twitter conversation on the #ibmimpact hashtag in various places throughout the event and the tag made it into the top Twitter trends on Day 1 of the conference.

As a Tivoli-er, I was keen on following the Service Management conversations around IBM Impact.

WebSphere CloudBurst ApplianceA big focus was on the WebSphere Cloudburst Appliance, a new IBM SOA appliance for deploying and managing SOA in a private cloud. It integrates with Tivoli data center management software and Rational development tools. It also ensures security of data and environments via an encrypted vault concept.

Al Zollar on Service Management, SOA, and a Smarter PlanetI really enjoyed watching the tweets during Day 2 of the conference when the Twitter crowd gave Al Zollar, General Manager of IBM Tivoli Software, a warm welcome during his keynote on Service Management, SOA, and a Smarter Planet. A few of the tweets included:

Fabian Marquez: "Al Zollar from Tivoli did a great job explaining Dynamic Infrastructure and Service Management."

James Governor: "Al Zollar from Tivoli talking about Vertical industry service management ie new IBM Service Management Solution for Healthcare."

Al will be giving an encore of his talk as he keynotes at the Pulse Comes to You Event on May 19 in New York. Pulse Comes to You (PCTY) is a worldwide tour. Check the PCTY Website for a free event near you.

IOD 2011 is just around the corner, and it should be no surprise that I was psyched to learn that Washington correspondent and anchor for BBC News Katty Kay is hosting the conference.

Full disclosure: I drive a Mini Cooper, I watch Doctor Who and I follow Neil Gaiman on Twitter.

So, yeah. I was also excited to see that she's going to be on stage with great IBM speakers like Jeff Jonas, Robert LeBlanc, Mike Rhodin and Steve Mills.

As if that wasn't enough (and there are a bunch of other IBM speakers not listed), guest speakers Mike Lewis and Billy Beane will also be there. Mike Lewis wrote the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game and Billy Beane is the VP and General Manager of the Oakland Athletics (the subject of the book).

I know, right? It's a pretty great group of speakers.

Having attended IOD in the past, it's a great show that I know that customers and business partners are going to get a lot of value out of.

Tivoli will be at IOD, and we're looking to meet customers such as yourself who are attending the conference. Here's a list of where you can find us:

Expo Center

IBM Tivoli Ped (Booth 101-04): IBM Tivoli/Predictive Analytics for IT and Service Management

We have a website with more details and of course you can follow the conversation on Twitter #iod11 and watch the general sessions on the Livestream.

...and speaking of Las Vegas and IBM Conferences. The Pulse 2012 call for speakers deadline is fast approaching (November 7). See Jen's Pulse blog for the details on how you can submit a session proposal.